PORTFOLIO #3: Article Summary and Critique
- Write a summary and critique of the attached article.
- Bring a hardcopy of your completed summary and critique for peer review Week7.
- Portfolio #3 is due on Week 8.
How to Write the Summary and Critique:
- Read the attached article.
- Write a 4-5 sentence (one paragraph) summary of the article. The summary should include all the main ideas of the original article, but in your own words and written in the third person. The first sentence must contain a “signal phrase” that states the article title, author name, and date of publication.
- Then write a 5-10 sentence critique of the article. This is your second paragraph, and will consist of your opinions about the article. Include a discussion of the author, the purpose of the article, who the audience is, the content, and the context of the article. Some questions you can answer are:
1) Why is the author credible? 2) Why did the author write the article?
3) Who are the intended and actual readers? 4) What is the main point of the article?
5) Where and when was the article published, and how would this affect the article?
- The summary and critique must contain two in-text citations taken from the article. These can appear anywhere in your two paragraphs. They can be quotes or paraphrases, and APA format must be used to cite Remember, ALL words, ideas, or information taken from the article MUST be cited properly, whether you use a direct quote (the author’s words) or a paraphrase (putting it into your own words). Chapter 21 in your textbook contains information on citing with APA format for in-text citations.
- Include an APA reference for the article on a separate reference page. Information on how to write a reference can be found in Chapter 21 of your textbook.
- The summary and critique should be one page total, double-spaced. The reference should be on a separate page from the summary and critique. Don’t forget a title page for the entire assignment.
Playing music keeps your hearing sharp
April 2, 2012 | by Nedra Floyd-Pautler, MA (Journalism), MA (Audiology), The Hearing Lab.
Playing a musical instrument combats age-related hearing and memory loss and could become a new component of the Baby Boomers’ health regimen—auditory fitness.
Neuroscientist Nina Kraus, PhD, and her team at Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory recently showed that music training changes the function and biology of the brain in critical ways.
By recording the electrical signals in the brains of musicians and non-musicians, they found that learning and continuing to play a musical instrument throughout life increases the speed and precision of neurons used for understanding speech and counteracts the normal slowing in neural timing that makes comprehending speech more difficult as we age, even without hearing loss. Precise neural timing is a terrific aid in facing our most challenging listening task at any age—hearing speech in noisy environments.
Neural timing is the ability to identify “landmarks” of a sound, like when it begins and ends.
Kraus’s work demonstrates that an aging brain can actually keep itself younger through musical study and cements evidence that school music programs boost students’ language, reading, motor and memory skills.
In a recent study, “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing,” published in Neurobiology of Aging in January 2012, Kraus and her colleagues monitored the automatic brain responses of 87 musicians and non-musicians ranging in age from 18 to 65. It turns out that, with musical experience, the brain retains its plasticity or “trainability” throughout life.
“Musical experience protects against age-related degradation in neural timing,” she said, and demonstrates that the brain is resilient throughout life.
Being a professional musician isn’t necessary. The musicians in the study started young, before age nine, and continued to practice, perform or teach music for at least 20 minutes three times a week, but many were hobbyists. Non-musicians in the study had fewer than three years of musical training.
She points out that musicians do not necessarily have an advantage in every listening situation. Their advantages are in particular situations—such as understanding speech in noise—and are the result of musical training. Lifelong musical training, it appears, exercises the entire auditory pathway, enabling a sharper representation of the sounds that give meaning to speech.
For example, aging slows our neural response to rapidly occurring sounds, like the beginning of the consonant sound /ba/, but not to the more stable sound of vowels like /a/. Consonants impart considerable meaning to speech sounds so being able to hear them is a definite advantage. “Musician’s nervous systems respond to these sounds faster than their non-musician peers; they respond nearly as quickly as young adults,” Kraus said. “This tells me that lifelong musical experience is analogous to a long-term auditory training program.”
How musical training aids in understanding speech is only beginning to be understood. Music and speech create very different listening experiences. A sound produced by a single musical instrument, a note on a saxophone for example, is not nearly as complex as speech sounds. And the meaning of an instrumental melody is more ambiguous than the meaning of a sentence.
But music and speech share some important attributes:
- Auditory working memory (the ability to hold in your memory and think about the sound you just heard;
- Selective attention skills (the ability to focus on important sounds and ignore others, and
- Syntax processing (grasping the rules that bind sounds together into meaningful messages).
Musicians develop auditory skills that enable them to notice minute changes in pitch, timing and timbre. These skills transfer to understanding speech, language and emotion. The result: Musicians are quicker at identifying sound patterns as words when learning new languages, have better auditory memory, vocabulary and even better fine motor skills. They read better and are biologically better at responding to emotional sounds like a baby’s cry. They have improved verbal memory, but not visual memory.
Repetition, concentration and more repetition appear essential. And repeatedly lying on the couch listening to Bob Dylan or Mozart won’t change your brain at the sub cortical level needed to boost your auditory skills. Based on another key discovery by Kraus, the brain has to be active.
Until recently the hearing process was thought of as sound waves traveling into the ear and being translated into electrical pulses that are picked up and understood in the brain. Kraus has shown that, instead of hearing being a one-way path from the ear to the brain, it’s a busy two-way street.
The brain’s auditory cortex sends messages back to the auditory brain stem based on our experiences and this back-and-forth dialogue strengthens hearing and auditory learning. Musical training enhances one’s ability to draw meaning from sound by strengthening and refining the feedback system, called the corticofugal network.
Kraus’s findings put biological proof to speech and hearing therapists’ experiential evidence about the power of music and may help in developing more refined and effective treatments.
Therapists have long known that music was a useful tool. Ear training has been used to help children hear and correct distorted speech sounds for generations. Singing is known to relieve some stuttering as shown in the movie, “The King’s Speech.” Melodic intonation therapy has been used successfully for patients with aphasia (difficulty in finding words, usually caused by a stroke).
“Music as a stimulus has always been there, but rarely mentioned in the literature, but now it is everywhere you look,” said Gail D. Chermak, Ph.D. She is professor of audiology and chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Washington State University.
“Music seems to enhance various functions, including attention, learning, communication, and memory,” Chermak wrote in a recent issue of The Hearing Journal. “It offers considerable potential in neuro-rehabilitation.
“Musical training doesn’t just tune central auditory processing,” Chermak said. “t tunes the cognitive system in a number of different ways—working memory, attention, even executive function, the ability to monitor and control yourself. I’m using music for auditory training, and for improving executive function in children. Musical chairs (an example of informal auditory training) and aerobic exercise to music may improve the prefrontal cortex and executive control. In fact, many types of activities involving bimanual coordination, including physical exercise and playing an instrument, can potentially lead to improved executive function.”
Kraus and others are continuing to define how music is processed in the brain and clarify the ways it improves language skills. And, as more is known new training materials will undoubtedly be developed. CDs and downloadable software programs may be developed to make auditory training more available for people adjusting to new hearing aids, children facing listening and learning challenges and adults wanting to keep their hearing sharp as they age.
Kraus considers musical training an important underpinning to all learning. In fact, her lab is studying the biological impact of music education on learning and nervous system development in four Chicago-area high schools and in Los Angeles through the Harmony Project, which offers year-round music lessons and ensemble participation to underserved children. She believes these programs can help children not only play music but also learn to read, listen in noisy classrooms, and improve their memory.
“As scientific evidence of music’s contribution to brain functioning mounts, it’s likely that more and more therapies using music will be developed,” Chermak said. “We know our brain is malleable until we die. That maximizes all rehab and intervention.”
